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Should gay marriage be legal in Illinois?
Updated: December 26, 2012 9:34AM
In January, our General Assembly may vote on whether gay marriage should be legal in Illinois.
How would I vote?
On the one hand, yes. More than 1,000 benefits and rights are available only to married couples. Sure seems unfair to deny those benefits and rights to gay couples.
On the other hand, no. It takes a man and woman to make a kid. So that’s the relationship that needs those privileges because it’s all about the kids, right?
But it’s also not who has you. It’s who loves you. Families built through adoption know that. Seems unfair to ban gay marriage because a gay couple can’t create their own biological child together.
Biology matters, though. Blood kin matters. I think of the actor Neil Patrick Harris and his partner who had their biological twins this way: They used an anonymous donor’s eggs from woman number one which were fertilized in a lab and then implanted into the womb of woman number two. (They likened their surrogate to “an oven.”)
That is really trying to remove the mom from the relationship!
Seems unfair to the kids to deliberately create them and then intentionally deprive them of ever knowing half their blood kin.
Certainly infertile straight couples need donors, but since all gay couples who don’t adopt need donors, it seems to me that legalizing gay marriage will result in way more anonymous donors being used.
That problem can be addressed by banning anonymous donors. Laws could give all children conceived via donors a legal right to know their biological parent.
On the other hand, many religions, including my own Catholic religion, condemn reproductive technologies. My church says that the only moral way to procreate is through the marriage act, the act of love between husband and wife.
Though that religious edict seems so unfair. After all, Jesus himself was not engendered through the marriage act. A miraculous reproductive technology achieved pregnancy in the Virgin Mary. Kind of paradoxical that the Catholic church condemns the very thing that gave us Jesus.
How should our Illinois lawmakers vote?
Gay marriage, yes or no?
Marie Anderson is a resident of La Grange.
